Every mobile app gives you something. It could be not only something tangible like the pair of jeans you've ordered using the app but also a piece of work like waking you up in the morning. It could be a feeling, for instance, a feeling of enjoyment obtained from watching a video clip or a feeling of closeness flashed out after receiving an old photo from a loving person via some instant messenger. That "something" is actually the reason why you use the app, it is the heart of the product, and in this course we will not talk about it. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. There are always two sides of a coin. There should be a person who makes that "something" accessible. It is astonishingly important because the use of the product loses its meaning if users can’t get what they want.
The main objective of the course is to teach you to shape mobile products and services for people’s use. To do that, you’ll need to learn:
- Interaction design activities and their place in the whole product design process
- User research methods with a focus on the qualitative ones
- Usability inspection and empirical usability evaluation methods
- The process of design creation and best practices from interaction design, information architecture and visual design fields of study with a focus on the former
Interfaces of handheld devices and tablets are in the spotlight. However, the processes and techniques covered by the course can be successfully applied to design interactions with mobile web apps and wearables. It should be noted that this course does not cover topics such as design management and mobile development, and it will as well not teach you how to use wireframing and prototyping tools.
What makes the course unique is a focus on the way of thinking during a design process, the representation of a designer’s decisions in the form of design questions that make the continuous reflection on the design process possible and leads to the growth of the number of proposed design alternatives. The second unique thing about this course is a focus on the explanation of the concept of usability problems, and the processes of discovering and analysing them.
Upon completion of the course, you will be able to:
- Improve designs by eliminating different kinds of interaction problems
- Design huge chunks of user interfaces in the case of adding a new feature to a product
- Redesign a complete app by a given set of functions (e.g., extending an existing product to a new platform)
The practical part of the course will require you to discover and eliminate interaction problems of a chosen mobile app. You will go through running guerrilla usability study, analysing gathered data, and making evidence-based design changes, which will enable you to create your first case study.

从本节课中

WEEK 8: Intro to Visual Design

Designing aesthetically pleasant user interfaces is no less important than designing usable interfaces. This week is solely dedicated to the former. You’ll learn how to choose and customise types, apply different types of colour schemes, select and use images, create a sign and design a harmonious layout of the mobile screen. Here you can find the peer-review assignment dedicated to the analysis of data gathered through guerrilla usability testing.